‘Plastics Are Awesome’: Contained in the Vitality Division’s Partnership With the Plastics Trade

By Joseph Winters & Emily Sanders, Grist

“This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.”

This story is a partnership between Grist and ExxonKnews, a reporting challenge overlaying the fossil gasoline trade.

Practically 5 years in the past, america Division of Vitality, or DOE, started an uncommon partnership with the nation’s largest lobbying group for the plastics trade.

In a memorandum of understanding with a plastics trade commerce affiliation referred to as the American Chemistry Council, or ACC, the Vitality Division pledged to “collaborate on the development of innovative plastics recycling technologies and strengthen the domestic plastics supply chain.”

In accordance with a press launch, the collaboration would contain analysis into “novel collection technologies” to maintain plastics out of waterways, in addition to new varieties of plastic which are “inherently designed for recycling.” However maybe probably the most vital a part of the settlement referred to analysis on so-called “advanced recycling” — a collection of applied sciences also referred to as “chemical recycling” which are favored by the ACC and different trade teams, and intensely scrutinized by environmental advocates.

Chemical recycling refers to processes that use excessive warmth, strain, or solvents to interrupt plastics into their constituent constructing blocks, to allow them to — in idea — be became new plastic merchandise many times. This differs from standard “mechanical” recycling, wherein plastics are shredded or melted earlier than being became new merchandise. Beneath fireplace for the failure of standard recycling to mitigate the plastic air pollution disaster, the petrochemical trade has turned to chemical recycling, closely selling it in public communications and to state legislators regardless of difficulties getting it to work at a big scale. Environmental teams and lots of scientists say the expertise won’t ever work, and that it’s a diversion from calls to scale back the manufacturing of plastic, which is made out of oil and fuel.

The settlement’s preliminary five-year time period is scheduled to run out early this month, simply days into President Donald Trump’s second time period.

In accordance with Ross Eisenberg, vice chairman of the ACC’s plastics division, the settlement by no means amounted to a lot. “The onset of COVID-19 postponed discussions, and with the subsequent change in administration, no work was conducted” underneath the memorandum of understanding, Eisenberg mentioned.

However public information point out the Division of Vitality has collaborated with the plastics trade to fund and promote chemical recycling analysis and tasks within the years because the settlement was signed. Scientists and environmental advocates say that the division’s partnerships with the trade lack transparency and symbolize a battle of curiosity. The ACC, whose members embody dozens of petrochemical firms that stand to profit from the quickly growing manufacturing of plastics, has continued to foyer the division — which has a accountability to work on behalf of the general public — yearly because the memorandum was introduced.

The ACC sought “to influence the policy agenda of the DOE and move it toward funding chemical recycling research and policy development as a priority over other issues,” mentioned Lee Bell, a coverage adviser for the nonprofit Worldwide Pollution Elimination Community. “It is clearly not an appropriate relationship for an industry lobby group to have with a department charged with the expenditure of millions in public funds.”

The DOE’s chemical recycling initiatives are a part of a protracted collection of presidency makes an attempt to take care of the overwhelming quantity of plastic waste the nation generates — and fails to recycle. As of 2019, the U.S. produced 44 million metric tons of plastic waste and recycled solely 5 p.c of it, in keeping with the Vitality Division. The remaining was despatched to landfills or incinerators, or wound up as litter within the setting. In a July 2024 report, the Biden administration mentioned plastic air pollution was “one of the most pressing and consequential environmental problems in the U.S. and around the globe.”

The Vitality Division’s function in U.S. plastics technique has primarily been to help analysis, a lot of it on recycling and the cleanup of present plastic waste. In 2019, it launched a “Plastics Innovation Challenge” to “accelerate energy efficient technologies that reduce plastic waste in oceans and landfills.” A month later, the division held a workshop to debate “Plastics for a Circular Economy” — together with a evaluation of the challenges and potentialities of chemical recycling. Workshop attendees included representatives of varied members of the ACC, together with ExxonMobil, Shell, and Dow — however no environmental organizations or citizen teams.

In accordance with the ACC’s Eisenberg, after the Plastics Innovation Problem was introduced, “American Chemistry Council members spoke with DOE to explore ways to support the initiative from a technology perspective, leading to the development of a memorandum of understanding in February 2020.” The company’s partnership with the ACC was described in a 2020 press launch as a possibility to “position the U.S. for global leadership in advanced recycling technologies, including plastic-to-energy conversion” — which means the conversion of plastic waste again into gasoline as a substitute of latest plastic merchandise.

Daniel Simmons, then the DOE’s assistant secretary for power effectivity and renewable power, praised the trade and its merchandise in the course of the memo’s public signing. “What does energy efficiency and renewable energy have to do with plastics recycling? It’s one: because plastics are awesome,” he mentioned on the time. “Obviously plastics can result in greater energy efficiency, food efficiency, a whole number of wonderful things. … The problem with plastics is not that they are bad, but because they are so good, and how do we make them better for the future?”

Environmental teams have been instantly skeptical. Judith Enck, president of the nonprofit Past Plastics and a former regional administrator for the Environmental Safety Company, mentioned she had “never seen this before,” referring to a multiyear settlement between a authorities company and what’s primarily an “advocacy lobbying group.” Extra usually, she mentioned, if the federal government is focused on supporting a selected kind of analysis it might funnel cash to state companies or conduct unbiased analysis via its community of nationwide laboratories.

Practically a yr after the settlement was introduced, the memo had nonetheless not been posted publicly. In 2021, the nonprofit Pure Assets Protection Council, or NRDC, filed a public information request for the memo and different communications between the DOE, ACC, and some other exterior events regarding chemical recycling and the division’s Plastics Innovation Problem. The request was filed underneath the Freedom of Data Act, which entitles the general public to entry any federal company information except they’re particularly exempt from public view.

Daniel Rosenberg, director of federal toxics coverage on the NRDC and the writer of that request, mentioned the group remains to be looking for solutions about how the Division of Vitality’s deal with chemical recycling happened — and the function trade gamers proceed to have in shaping the division’s strategy to managing plastic air pollution.

“There’s no transparency on how DOE is developing their policies around plastic waste,” mentioned Rosenberg. “They seem very much in line with the industry agenda that’s clearly formalized in the memorandum of understanding.”

It wasn’t till six months later that the DOE despatched the NRDC the official memo — however not any associated paperwork answering the group’s different questions. Final yr, the NRDC sued the Vitality Division for failing to reply to its requests and repeated outreach. “They’ve done a pretty good job over the last five years of keeping public scrutiny at bay,” mentioned Rosenberg, who has since filed a second freedom of data request with the company. “What DOE does on plastic, how they spend their research money, the solutions they’re promoting, all of which is consequential — we’re just trying to get to the bottom of how it all came about and how it’s continued to develop.”

The lawsuit is ongoing, however the DOE has agreed to course of lots of of paperwork per thirty days concerning the unique information request and ship related paperwork to the NRDC. Although a January standing report back to the court docket reveals the division has delivered greater than 200 pages of paperwork to the NRDC because the lawsuit started, Rosenberg mentioned he’s to this point acquired a “small fraction” of the communications he’s sought. A public information request filed on behalf of ExxonKnews and Grist in October has not but yielded any paperwork.

Even when the formal settlement between the DOE and the ACC by no means obtained off the bottom, because the lobbying group claims, the Vitality Division’s backing of chemical recycling analysis means that the company has embraced the trade’s characterization of the plastic waste downside as a difficulty that may be solved via innovation. By January 2026, the division is about to have spent $10 million funding the Chemical Upcycling of Waste Plastics, a middle for chemical recycling analysis and tutorial collaboration that features 20 industrial companions, together with ACC member firms and one other plastic trade commerce group that sits on the middle’s “industrial advisory board.” The DOE’s newest “Strategies for Plastic Innovation” report requires extra analysis into chemical recycling, deeming the applied sciences “crucial to begin addressing the global plastic crisis.”

Final yr, as a part of an initiative by Joe Biden’s administration to “decarbonize energy-intensive industries,” the DOE awarded a grant of as much as $375 million to a controversial chemical recycling challenge from the Eastman Chemical Firm, an ACC member. Eastman has since requested the Texas Fee on Environmental High quality to allow the discharge of a further 114 tons of annual air air pollution at its facility in Longview, Texas, the place the brand new challenge is being constructed.

“These are extraordinary amounts that are going to high-priority serial violators of the Clean Air Act,” mentioned Cynthia Palmer, senior analyst for petrochemicals on the nonprofit Mothers Clear Air Power. At its Kingsport, Tennessee, petrochemical refinery, the place Eastman’s different chemical recycling facility is housed, the EPA documented high-priority violations of the Clear Air Act each quarter of the previous three years.

Working with the Vitality Division was only one prong within the ACC’s marketing campaign to legitimize chemical recycling. Within the U.S., the group has additionally spent years lobbying state legislatures to reclassify chemical recycling as a producing course of, relatively than waste disposal. Two dozen states have handed such reclassification payments, as of final yr.

The ACC has additionally promoted the inclusion of chemical recycling within the United Nations’ international plastics treaty, which was scheduled to be accomplished final December however has been stalled by disagreements over its scope. Provisions for chemical recycling haven’t but been included into the settlement’s draft textual content, however specialists say the compact between the ACC and the Vitality Division was a part of the trade’s try to vary that by creating analysis to display that chemical recycling is environmentally sound.

Scientists have criticized among the particular analysis carried out by the Vitality Division’s nationwide laboratories with ACC funding, like a life cycle evaluation from the Argonne Nationwide Laboratory displaying decreased carbon emissions from chemical recycling, in comparison with different waste administration choices. The ACC has cited this examine in public communications arguing towards plastic discount.

In a 16-page rebuttal to the examine shared with ExxonKnews and Grist, Bell, with the Worldwide Pollution Elimination Community, referred to as out the examine’s use of “nonreproducible data based on ‘discussions’ with industry.”

Neil Tangri, analysis and coverage director for the nonprofit World Alliance for Incinerator Options, mentioned the examine inbuilt “wildly unrealistic assumptions” about the potential of substituting pyrolysis oil — a most important output from the preferred chemical recycling technique — for the present fossil gasoline feedstock naphtha. He additionally criticized the examine for utilizing confidential information that’s “not transparent” and “not replicable”: “That is completely inimical to the way science works,” he mentioned.

Palmer, of Mothers Clear Air Power, added that such life cycle analyses don’t keep in mind vital environmental and public well being issues attributable to plastic manufacturing or chemical recycling, making them “highly misleading.”

“National laboratories should not be aiding and abetting the deceptive practices of the petrochemical industry,” Tangri mentioned.

In latest months, the ACC and several other of its member firms have been sued by state and native governments and people, arguing that the trade intentionally misled the general public concerning the viability of mechanical and chemical recycling, regardless of figuring out it might by no means be capable to handle the waste generated by rising plastic manufacturing.

Jeffrey Seay, a chemical engineering professor on the College of Kentucky, mentioned the prospects for some type of chemical recycling breakthrough — the type trade teams suggest is simply across the nook — are slim. “I’d love to tell you I’ve seen that research, but I haven’t,” he mentioned. “I think it’s something worthwhile to be looking at, but I’m just not of the opinion that there’s a technology on the horizon that’s going to allow us to consume plastic the way we have always consumed plastic.”

Seay added that, opposite to trade claims, he’s “not aware of a technology where you can just dump a bunch of mixed plastic in there and get clean polymers out on the other side. There’s a lot of research going on in this area … but to commercialize that, you’d be decades away.”

A 2023 peer-reviewed examine carried out by DOE additionally acknowledged that three chemical recycling applied sciences — glycolysis, hydrolysis, and methanolysis — are “an order of magnitude” extra polluting and energy-intensive than standard recycling.

The Biden administration’s Vitality Division declined to touch upon the standing of its memorandum of understanding with the ACC, citing “the upcoming administration transition.” The company didn’t reply to further requests for remark after Trump’s inauguration final month.

As a more recent, bolder Trump administration returns to workplace with fracking govt Chris Wright set to helm the DOE, Enck and different advocates are skeptical — however nonetheless hoping — that the Trump DOE will cease propping up the plastic trade altogether.

“If the DOE was really interested in energy savings, they should be putting resources into waste reduction, refill, and reuse,” mentioned Enck, of Past Plastics.

Rosenberg, of the NRDC, expressed issues that the Trump administration might proceed working with the trade behind the scenes. Both manner, he mentioned, the DOE owes People readability concerning the nature of its work on chemical recycling.

“Whether it’s the Trump administration or the Biden administration, I don’t really care — the public should have transparency on what this department is doing on this issue, which has such serious implications for pollution and health and environment,” he mentioned. “We’ll just keep pursuing it.”

Editor’s observe: ExxonKnews is a reporting challenge of the Heart for Local weather Integrity, an advocacy group that gives analysis and instruments to assist communities maintain oil and fuel companies accountable. The middle’s political employees was not concerned in producing this story.

This text initially appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/accountability/energy-department-american-chemistry-council-chemical-recycling/.

Grist is a nonprofit, unbiased media group devoted to telling tales of local weather options and a simply future. Study extra at Grist.org

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The submit ‘Plastics Are Awesome’: Contained in the Vitality Division’s Partnership With the Plastics Trade appeared first on The Good Males Venture.

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